Can the Barclays save 'The Daily Telegraph'?

Let us commence with the obituary, Lord Black's. For whether or not the Barclay brothers end up owning The Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black has definitely been expelled from Fleet Street. All the prestige that goes with owning national newspapers has gone. What did Michael Howard, the Tory party leader, care about Lord Black's opinions on Saturday? Quite a lot. And today? Mr Howard will have forgotten who he is by the end of the afternoon.

The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph have improved during the 17 years they were under Lord Black's control. I hope it is not considered boastful to say that the newly launched Independent - which arrived at the same time as Lord Black as the Telegraph's proprietor - pioneered a whole series of innovations which rivals quickly picked up. We created special pages on education; so did The Daily Telegraph. We gave personal health much more attention. Ditto.

Sometimes, though, the result was imitation with pleasing differences. After The Independent had started to treat obituaries as one of the most interesting pages in the newspaper, The Daily Telegraph developed a line in accounts of the lives of ex-colonial governors, of military men who hadn't seen much action but excelled in polo and of countesses who had hunted from their tumbledown mansions in Ireland during decades of widowhood.

Nonetheless, the main commercial problem Lord Black faced in 1987 when he took over has still not been solved. The newspapers' elderly readership falls away more quickly than new readers arrive. It has faced the acute problem of attracting the young without offending older loyalists. Recently, this predicament has led The Daily Telegraph to dress itself in young clothes, like a middle aged divorcee looking for a toy boy - embarrassing to the rest of us, and without impact on its sale figures, which have continued to slide. My advice is not to try. The Daily Telegraph should be itself. It is a conservative newspaper for the older middle classes and it shouldn't try to be anything else.

Lord Black also injected the neo-conservative values espoused by President George W Bush into The Daily Telegraph's opinion pages.

He may have thought that this type of Republicanism is authentically Tory. But it isn't. It ignores the whole Disraeli, one-nation tradition. Its stance is more Thatcher than Thatcher and that is off the map.

Under Lord Black, the newspaper also, in neo-con fashion, took a closer interest in Israel than its readers probably wished. Inevitably, The Daily Telegraph supported the Bush-Blair war against Saddam Hussein in every detail. It saw the Prime Minister's role as statesmanship of the highest order. But sooner or later, the newspaper will realise that what it thought was patriotism was in fact a betrayal of British interests. It was backing a venture fit to stand in the annals of British foreign policy disasters alongside Anthony Eden's Suez invasion nearly 50 years ago.

In the short term at least, the Barclay brothers have acted shrewdly in doing a deal with Lord Black. He was a forced seller par excellence. They took advantage. For on Saturday, a $200million lawsuit against Lord Black and the companies he controls was announced, alleging that the parties had "diverted and usurped assets and opportunities".

It was also stated that Lord Black had been removed from his position as non-executive chairman with immediate effect. He had to sell to get out from under, so to speak.

The Barclay brothers, too, played to their strengths. They have no public shareholders to consult, for their assets are privately held. And owning only one, small daily newspaper in Britain, The Scotsman, they could promise that the competition authorities here were unlikely to object.

The brothers are famously secretive - but that is their right, providing they are behaving legally.

Yet I have some doubts whether the two Telegraphs and the other assets being sold - The Spectator, the Chicago-Sun Times and The Jerusalem Post will finally end up with the Barclays. For the outside shareholders in the companies which were controlled by Lord Black, mainly American institutions and private investors, are exceedingly angry. They have alleged that he and his associates have been syphoning off funds for their private purposes and they have used the full armoury of American commercial law to press their case.

Most important of all, they have engendered a serious investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Wall Street's equivalent of our own Financial Services Authority. But tougher and more relentless.

Barbara Amiel, Lord Black's brilliant journalist wife, may find she is also a target. It's a favourite tactic, pressure the wife to get to the husband.

Certainly, shareholders will want full value for their assets and they know that a rushed deal by Lord Black over one weekend is unlikely to have secured the best price. They will try to arrange the holding of a proper auction. There are plenty of other potential buyers for the group.

I fear for the Barclay brothers, however, if they do control the Telegraphs. For no market is more cut-throatedly competitive than British national newspapers. There is no equivalent anywhere else in the world. The New York Times and The Washington Post, for instance, sail along without any serious competition. But among The Daily Telegraph's rivals, there is, for instance, Mr Rupert Murdoch with The Times and The Sunday Times. He has made no secret of his ambition to topple The Daily Telegraph from its pole position in terms of circulation among quality daily papers.

His first tactic, which was also very damaging to other broadsheets, was a price war. That came to an end. But he quickly followed The Independent's very successful decision last autumn to offer a compact version of the newspaper alongside the traditional broadsheet. The Daily Telegraph has yet to follow suit and is suffering as a result. I just hope the Barclay's private fortune can stand the strain of all this.

Looking back through the 150-year history of The Daily Telegraph, you can see great success but overall decline. It was founded in 1855 to attack the Commander in Chief of the British Army, the Duke of Cambridge. This was not a winning formula, and by the end of the year, the newspaper had fallen into the hands of its printer, Joseph Levy. He took it over. He was a gifted entrepreneur and his son, Edward, became an exceptional editor.

Together by the 1880s, they had created the largest circulation newspaper in the world. Edward Levy became Edward Levy-Lawson and later the first Lord Burnham. When I left the newspaper in 1985, its managing director was Hugh Lawson of the same family. But in 1928, another gifted businessman had intervened and acquired control, William Berry, later Lord Camrose. He rescued the newspaper from hard times and set it on a course which was to last until the 1980s when Conrad Black bought it from his son, Michael, Lord Hartwell.

So this is what I see over the decades at the Telegraph: the swift rise and the slow sinking. The Berrys were not as brilliant as the original Lawsons; likewise Lord Black has been less successful than his predecessors.

It remains to be seen whether the new owners will halt the long downward trend.